The European Federation for Medical Informatics is a regional coordinat­ ing body. The Congress in Dublin. MIE 82. from 21st to 25th March 1982. is the fourth in the series following MIE 78 in Cambridge. MIE 79 in Berlin. There was a break in 1980 for the World Congress - MEDINFO 8- in Tokyo. This was followed by MIE 81 in Toulouse. The rationale behind these congresses is the scientific need to share results and ideas. and the educational need to train a wide variety of professional staff in the potential of Medical Informatics in health care delivery. All the caring professions are involved. doctors. scientists. nurses. pharma­ cists. paramedical staff. administrators. health care planners. commu­ nity physicj-US'I,!Dedical educationalists. epidemiologists. statisti­ cians. o. pe-~atio'ns 'analysts. together with specialists from the comput­ ing profession dealin~ with systems analysis. hardware. software. lan­ guages. data ba,s~s and marketing of systems. The pre-publi~~tion of'conference proceedings from a multi-stream con­ ference is partic~l~t~y valuable in a rapidly expanding multidisciplin­ ary field su~h as'M~dical Informatics. It enables participants to fol­ low work presented at sessions that they are unable to attend. More im­ portantly. is also provides a permanent record with relevant bibliogra­ phy for other workers to assess which groups are active and in which areas. All the papers have been refereed and the referees' suggestions incorporated in the final texts. Rapid publication. using camera-ready copy. reduces the time available for editing and indexing.

Session A1: Hospital Information Systems.- Session A2: Clinical Laboratory Systems.- Session A3: Applications in Obstetrics and Perinatal Medicine.- Session A4: Signal Analysis.- Session A5: General Practice/Ambulatory Care.- Session A6: Nursing Applications.- Session A7: Drug Information Systems.- Session A8: Administrative and Financial Applications.- Session A9: Patient Monitoring/Intensive Care.- Session B1: Medical Methodology.- Session B2: Evaluation of Health Care.- Session B3: Medical Research.- Session B4: Epidemiology.- Session C1: Educational Needs and Concepts.- Session C2: Privacy, Confidentiality and Social Aspects.- Session C3: Community Health Care.- Session D1: New Technology.- Session D2: Networks Distributed Systems and Data Bases.- Session D3: Free Text Processing.- Session D4: Models of Health Care.- KEYNOTE ADDRESSES.- AUTHOR INDEX.